Playing to your strengths – how important is this change & transformation?

In team sports there is an old saying – “always play to your strengths”

But what does this mean in reality?

If you are the coach of a football team and you have a group of great forwards, does that mean always play on the front foot? The risk of this is that if you’re not careful, other teams will highlight your deficiencies in defence and end up scoring more goals than you!

Your longevity as a coach will be short-lived if this is your reality!

The key in my opinion is to ensure that you play the individual team members in a formation that suits them – that allows them to be the best that they can be and deliver the maximum impact on the desired results.

This is as relevant in business as it is in the sporting world.

It’s even more important that you get this right when you are running change and transformation programmes. But how do you achieve it? How do you ensure that you have the right team members in the programme at the right time to allow them to deliver maximum impact and ‘play to their strengths’

A great starting point is to identify the areas where the individual team members want to operate, where they feel most energised and engaged. Equally to keep them away from those aspects of the programme that will potentially ‘drain’ them.

We all remember those days lining up in the school playgrounds waiting to be picked for a team. Whether it was for football, netball or any sports, when the teachers said those famous words (in the case of football) “who wants to go in goal”, whilst most would drop their heads towards the floor, there would always be one whose arm would shoot up and shout “me, sir!”

That person was most energised when offered a position as a goalkeeper.

Hopefully his/her abilities matched their enthusiasm 🙂

Within business and when leading change, it is important that you pull together teams that complement each other and work effectively towards the core objective of the change initiative. Understanding what makes them ‘tick’ and where they can best deliver maximum value/ impact is a critical skill in delivering successful change.

The GC Index® (a.k.a. The Game-Changing Index) is the organimetric that empowers organisations to drive performance and achieve innovation by creating game-changing teams and cultures. It’s a radical re-think of how organisations identify and nurture key talent; identifying how people at all levels in organisations make their best impact.

Within the context of a transformation programme, it provides insights into where individuals can add maximum value and supports the leader to pull together a team that can effectively work together to deliver the programme.

Everyone will have their own preferences and different aspects that helps them feel most energised. The GC Index puts a framework around this by focusing upon five core proclivities that follow the ‘business cycle’.

It’s a real game changer (pardon the pun) for those structuring transformation programmes in the future as it will provide visibility of where individual stakeholders, SMEs and team members can deliver maximum impact and where if you are not careful conflicts can easily arise.

For instance, if you have a team of ‘Game Changers’ constantly coming up with new ideas or a different perspective to consider, the ‘Implementers’ will get frustrated by the constant change in scope or focus. These conflicts and visibility of how to understand upcoming conflict situations along how to deal with them are all illuminated by the GC Index approach.

To be successful in delivering change, you need to pull together a team of people with complementary skills and experience who are operating in those ares where the are most energised to deliver – playing to their strengths. The following video highlights this perfectly.

If you’re interested to learn more about how The GC Index can help you within your change initiatives, drop me a quick email (tony.lockwood@gunnercooke.com) and we can grab a call to discuss things further.